Foreword to the English Edition

I wrote this book following a journey made in November 1971. Today I should like to draw the attention of readers to two very important points. Firstly, the book is not by any means a final account, still less an estimate of the average degree of women’s emancipation in China. I have tried to outline orientations and trends. It is, if you like, a book about the “Chinese road” toward the emancipation of women. The road itself is a winding one and often seems uncertain of its direction—but the route can be clearly seen and the overall direction discovered. Secondly, the book is also, and perhaps just as much, about the problems we women in the West face in today’s struggle for our own emancipation. I have always thought, and still do, that a study of the Chinese experience in this area is an absolutely vital prerequisite for any clarification of the arguments about “women’s liberation and social liberation.” Just as vital, in fact, as learning from the failure of the Russian Revolution, which I consider to be the greatest tragedy of the workers’ (and therefore of the women’s) movement. I am more than ever convinced that despite the undeniable and timely gains of the new women’s movement, the most important thing is still to “dismantle,” as a watchmaker would a watch, the complex and precise mechanism of women’s oppression—both the machinery supporting the specific situation of women and the organic network of its connections with the exploitative society. We can no longer be content with platitudes about women’s condition or with received ideas (even if they do happen to be fashionable) about “phallocracy.” The directions we must take on the journey towards our liberation are written in their entirety in the material base of our oppression—and I think that everything, or almost everything, is yet to be done.

I should like to add one more point. I often read (and hear) that socialism, “even in China,” doesn’t liberate women. Where is the evidence for this observation? There are still fewer women than men in administrative positions, women still do more work than men in the home and more looking after children, and so on. But what these arguments ignore is that there is a sense in which socialism doesn’t liberate the proletariat either, “even in China.” The wage system still exists; there are still important divisions between manual workers and intellectuals and between urban and rural areas; there is still the State. There is still class and the class struggle. There is a constant danger of capitalism being restored. You have to be blind not to see this possibility. To me the real issues are altogether different. We must look at the existence of workers’ power in a socialist society—that is, a society whose twin characteristics are the destruction of social relations of production based on exploitation (in China, both capitalist and feudal relations) and the embryonic emergence of new communist social relations—and we must ask if that is the sole condition to be fulfilled before the long march of women’s liberation can get fully under way. And we must also ask whether or not workers’ power is viable without the developing struggle of millions of women to break their age-old chains.

I should like the English edition to make some contribution towards the discussion of these issues. As for the rest, the book contains some debatable arguments and a number of major or minor errors. I am aware of a few of these but not of others, and in any case, I think it would be dishonest to correct them now. I originally wanted to submit raw material, warts and all, to be refined in discussion and debate about our cause. I still do. It is clear to me that this discussion and debate emphatically result in a demand that we should return to Marxism.

Claudie Broyelle Beijing, July 1974